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Saturday, August 8, 2015

Planned Parenthood: Is It Our Nuremberg?

Hat tip Eagle Rising

Josef Mengele"It's lunch time."

Josef Mengele was a Nazi doctor who stood at the railway siding at Auschwitz and selected which arrivals went straight to the gas chamber and which were (temporally) allowed to live. He was also noted for conducting inhuman experiments on twins. Running today in Eagle Rising is a provocative piece by Michael Minkoff, in which he says that Planned Parenthood is our Nuremberg.

Those who disagree can point out obvious differences between Nazi medical research, which was conducted on people who had long since been born and the fetuses of Planned Parenthood. The article does raise undeniable similarities, however. I will raise one more similarity. Imagine Josef Mengele after a hard morning of experimenting on twins taking a lunch break. As he stuffs his salad down his throat and sips his wine, could his conversation about his work have been any more casual and matter of fact than that of Dr Deborah Nucatola of Planned Parenthood as revealed in the first video exposed by the Center for Medical Progress? I doubt it.

Similarities? Ending human life and using the cadavers /fetus for medical research. As for my own similarity, are you arguing that Mengele at Auschwitz was a tortured soul praying God for forgiveness every night? He escaped Germany and ended his days decades later drowning on a beach in Brazil. (At least he didn't choke on his salad.)

Is that your best shot? Pathetic Gary, truly pathetic. Mengele's crimes, primarily consisted of performing painful and scientifically useless experiments on live human subjects. The longer he could keep them alive the better. Death was an unfortunate end to the experiment, although probably by that time a mercy for those he experimented upon.

Using cadavers for research has a long and respectable pedigree. There are some boundaries to be policed, such as the "resurrectionist" trade in Victorian England, where bodies were dug up from graves without permission to be sold to doctors for dissection. Also there is some reason to think certain disreputable gentlemen killed people on the street in order to sell their bodies for research. But, nobody has made the slightest allegation that PP or anyone else is offering bonus payments to women to induce them to have abortions they otherwise would not have had, so the fetuses could be used for research.

Now, we come to the fundamental difference over premises: inherently, pro-life people say that a fetus is a human being from the moment of conception, while pro-choice people say no, it is not, not until it has at least some attributes of being independent of the woman in whose body it is growing. One can recognize the integrity of the opposite argument, without accusing someone of first degree intentional homicide.

By law, PP is NOT ending human life. Dr. Gosnell was ending human life, and he is in prison for it. Nothing in those videos constitutes homicide. All that we are talking about is the disposal of fetal remains, which you insist are dead babies, and others insist are not dead babies at all. (There remains the fact that a tiny percentage of abortions are performed during the third trimester, when almost everyone agrees that this is a baby, nearly fully formed, capable of surviving if "from its mother's womb untimely torn," capable of at least a rudimentary self awareness, but, in a tiny number of cases there is no way to get it out alive without endangering the life of the mother. (Such a baby, in Orthodox Jewish doctrine, is called a Destroyer, and in such cases, abortion is mandatory, according to Jewish religious law).

There remains the issue of whether it is ethical to donate fetal remains for research, or whether they should be cremated or buried, no research allowed. Nobody has accused Mengele of shipping organs packed in ice to hospitals all over the world. If he had, the source of those organs would have been a legitimate issue, because nobody disputes that he killed live human persons in violation of all kinds of national and international laws.

Gary, not only have I disagreed, and pointed out obvious differences... but you have yet to point out a single remote similarity!

Life began some 3 billion years ago. Primate life began some millions of years ago. If you really want continuity, we are all extensions of the first life form, since there is a series of begats from the first to the present.

Focusing more on human history, the sperm and the ova were alive before they ever met. All the millions of sperms cells that die without consummating union with an ova are alive, until they die. So "when life begins" is not the relevant question.

Every cell in a woman's body is alive, although some are continually dying and being replaced. What we are really debating is when does a person independent of the pregnant woman begin?

You rely on the genetic argument: once there is a single cell with a unique new genetic signature that is coded to grow into a unique new human being (or identical twins or triplets, occasionally), you believe a person independent of the pregnant woman exists. Many agree with you. Many of us do not. I consider that the existence of an independent person requires not only a unique genetic zip file, but the growth of organs that constitute an actual independent organism, capable of living independently outside the woman's body, and with a minimal central nervous system capable of some rudimentary self-awareness.

I think week 20 is a reasonable place to draw the line, to be on the safe side, as long as the pregnant woman's life or long-term health are not in danger. I would also insert some leeway for prospective parents who learn of a severe genetic or infectious deformity that could not have been discovered earlier -- but I understand there are some new tests that can be done much earlier, and without a needle, so maybe that isn't needed.

Precisely the type of argument I want to avoid. (Thanks for explaining to me what I believe about the growth of the fetus etc) However, I will make one point:

"You rely on the genetic argument: once there is a single cell with a unique new genetic signature that is coded to grow into a unique new human being (or identical twins or triplets, occasionally), you believe a person independent of the pregnant woman exists."

Did you (or I) skip that stage perhaps and go directly to the 20 week point-you know, kind of like Kris Bryant and Kyle Schwarber went to the Cubs after one year in the minors. Unless you did, surely you must have some sympathy and concern for the ones at the earlier stages. Left alone they become human beings.

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Roger Gardner of Radarsite (1936-2009)

About Me

Born 1945 in Los Angeles. Worked from 1998-2016 as adjunct teacher at University of California at Irvine Ext. teaching English as a second language.
Served three years in US Army Military Police at Erlangen, Germany 1966-68.
1970-1973- Criminal Investigator with US Customs
1973-1995 Criminal investigator with Drug Enforcement Administration. Stationed in Los Angeles, Bangkok, Milan, Italy, Pittsburgh and Office of Training, FBI Academy, Quantico, Va. until retirement.
Author of Erlangen-An American's History of a German Town-University Press of America 2005,
The Story of Papiamentu- A Study in Slavery and Language, University Press of America, 2002, and
The Languages of the Former Soviet Republics-Their History and Development, University Press of America, 2000.